It is estimated that more than half the world population - some 3.5 billion people - watched part of the FIFA World Cup in 2018. Football is unquestionably the world's most popular sport, with a dedicated fan base and truly international reach. It is also a significant industry, with European football alone being estimated to hold a value of £22 billion in 2016. How did football evolve to be such a significant part of our cultural landscape, and what role has design played in shaping the sport?
This catalogue - the first of its kind - will explore the design story behind football, unpicking how design has been used to push the game to its technical and emotional limits. From the master-planning of the world's most significant football stadiums to the innovative materials used in today's boots, the graphic design of team badges and the grassroots initiatives pushing back against the sport's commercialization, this book will provide a rare insight into the people and processes that have made football what it is today.
The book will be divided into five chapters, taking readers on a journey from the large-scale impact of the world's great stadia through to digital technologies shaping the sport today. Each chapter will feature both formal and informal design projects, showcasing the incredible relationship between football and its fans.
James Bird is associate editor and creative lead at Mundial magazine, a bimonthly publication on football. He is the writer and producer of the podcasts GIANT and RAW. He has also worked on The Big Book of Football (2020), an introduction to football for children aged between nine and eleven.
Thomas Turner is a historian, writer, and researcher. His work explores the history of modern popular culture, with a current emphasis on the histories of clothing, design, and music. He studied for my BA at Oxford University, and my MA and PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. His first book, The Sports Shoe: A History from Field to Fashion, was published by Bloomsbury in 2019. It is the first in-depth, illustrated history of the sports shoe from the 19th to the 21st Century. It traces the development of the sports shoe against the changing landscape of society, sport, fashion, industry, and technology. His research and writing have been published in several books and journals.
Sam Handy is a British born Creative Director and Designer, currently Vice President of Design for adidas Football. In 2002, Sam began working at British streetwear brand maharishi where he was a member of the core team curating and publishing the DPM encyclopedia of camouflage. He then worked as head designer on menswear ranges. In 2009 he joined the adidas originals brand in Herzogenaurach Germany as head of footwear design, working on the relaunches of iconic products Stan Smith, Superstar and most recently as designer of the ZX Flux and NMD. Since 2015, Sam has taken the creative lead of adidas football, working with the brands innovation and global design teams to ensure that the legacy and lead in football footwear and apparel is continued into the future.
Roxanne Bottomley is a graphic designer, researcher and educator with a focus on feminist approaches to design. Her work uses participatory and critical design tools to build up alternative graphic languages within football, with a focus on the grassroots women's game.
Floor Wesseling is the creative director of Studio Wesseling, a creative design studio based in Amsterdam. They design mostly visual, tangible, experimental and formal indoor, outdoor and football identities.
Jacqui McAssey is a lecturer at the Liverpool School of Art and Design. Her work explores strategies for styling, aspects of contemporary photography within the wider subjects of fashion, fandom and sport. She founded GIRLFANS, a visual ethnographic study of female football fans.
Jacques Herzog is, with Pierre de Meuron, the founder of Herzog & de Meuron. He has been visiting professor at Harvard University since 1989, and was professor at ETH Zürich and co-founder of ETH Studio Basel - Contemporary City Institute. Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2001), the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (2007), the Praemium Imperiale (2007), and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (2014).
Martin Tyler is an English football commentator and assistant manager at Woking. He has worked as a commentator for Sky Sports since 1990, covering the Premier League and UEFA Champions League, as well as other domestic and international competitions. Tyler had previously commentated for ITV in the 1970s and 80s. He provided his voice to the football video game series FIFA from 2005 until 2019. FIFA 20 was the last game he ran commentary on as both him and Alan Smith were cut from FIFA 21. In 2003, he was voted the FA Premier League Commentator of the Decade.
Miles Jacobson OBE is studio director of Sports Interactive, the team behind the Football Manager series of video games, and creators of the original Championship Manager.
Russell Jones has over 15 years of experience in the sports marketing industry having held senior roles at the IAAF, Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers. He led the implementation of the first CRM project in football back in 2003 and was also instrumental in the first ever charity shirt sponsorship in 2007. At Wolves he oversees branding, digital communications and the club's fan growth & engagement strategy. Since his appointment in December 2017, the club has launched an eSports team and social media language channels in Mandarin, Cantonese, Portuguese and Spanish - substantially increasing the club's reach into new markets.
Percy M. Young was a British musicologist, editor, organist, composer, conductor and teacher. He was also an avid football fan and historian, writing several histories of league clubs, including Wolverhampton Wanderers (Centenary Wolves 1877-1977) and Manchester United (Heinemann 1960), plus a history of the game itself (A History of British Football).
Eleanor Watson is a curator at the Design Museum. Her previous exhibitions include Material Tales (2021), Moving to Mars (2020), Beazley Designs of the Year (2017 and 2018) and Imagine Moscow: Architecture, Propaganda Revolution (2017). She has also curated over a dozen public displays, including the first retrospective of UK architect Peter Barber, 100 Mile City and Other Stories. Outside of her work at the museum, she has acted as curator of the 2019 edition of Global Grad Show.